Strawfoot Read online

  Contents

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  BEFORE THE FACT

  CHAPTERS

  ONE

  NINE

  SEVENTEEN

  TWO

  TEN

  EIGHTEEN

  THREE

  ELEVEN

  NINETEEN

  FOUR

  TWELVE

  TWENTY

  FIVE

  THIRTEEN

  TWENTY-ONE

  SIX

  FOURTEEN

  TWENTY-TWO

  SEVEN

  FIFTEEN

  TWENTY-THREE

  EIGHT

  SIXTEEN

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  AFTER THE FACT

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to my wife, Elizabeth, for all her love, patience and support over so many wonderful years and to my late mother and father, whose faith in me to one day achieve my ambition as a writer remained steadfast throughout their lifetime and whose tragic passing has left a hole in my life that will never be filled.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although the action of this novel takes place in the Avon & Somerset police area, the story itself and all the characters in it are entirely fictitious. Similarly, at the time of writing, there is no police station in Highbridge. This has been drawn entirely from the author’s imagination to ensure no connection is made between any existing police station or personnel in the force and the content of the novel. I would also point out that I have used some poetic licence in relation to the local police structure and some of the specific procedures followed by Avon & Somerset Police in order to meet the requirements of the plot. Nevertheless, the policing background depicted in the novel is broadly in accord with the national picture and these little departures from fact will, hopefully, not spoil the reading enjoyment of serving or retired police officers for whom I have the utmost respect. Finally, I would add that scarecrow festivals actually do take place in various villages throughout Somerset during the course of each year and it may be of interest to my readers to know that it was the imaginative display of these sinister figures in a line of driveways and gardens as I was driving home one gloomy evening that provided me with the inspiration for this novel and raised the question that is forever in the mind of every fiction writer: ‘What if. . . ?’

  David Hodges

  BEFORE THE FACT

  Somerset Levels, 1863

  Ghost lights. Bobbing eerily in the dank mist that choked the Somerset Levels like balls of iridescent bog cotton. Blurred figures moving wraith-like along the drove. Voices calling hoarsely to each other, fear lacing their tone, as if each took comfort from the presence of the other.

  ‘Jeremiah, d’ye see anything, man?’

  A marsh bird rose from among the reeds to Tom Draycott’s right with a startled cry but there was no response from his friend and neighbour. Fearing the 60-year-old withy worker might have missed his footing and fallen into the rhyne bordering the track, Tom was about to shout again when the faint disembodied reply drifted back to him on the clouds of mist. ‘Nay, Tom but keep looking. The wench must be near.’

  On the other side of the rhyne, Jeremiah Tinney licked his lips nervously, wiping away the fine drizzle streaming down his thin weather-beaten face with one arthritic hand. Martha – his only daughter – was always home before this. It was but a short walk to their isolated cottage along the drove from the inn on the outskirts of Westhay where she worked in the evenings and she was never this late. Would that Martha’s mother had still been alive, then maybe the girl’s wayward nature might have been curtailed. Jeremiah was tired of trying to tame her himself. The belt had achieved nothing – it had only made her more stubborn – and, from what he’d heard, she seemed to take a delight in flaunting herself in front of the inn’s rough customers as she replenished their pint pots with local cider, shaming not only herself but her own father as well. And now she had gone missing and was heaven alone knew where.

  Jeremiah stopped a few seconds to relight his pipe, which had succumbed to the damp, sucking on the badly chewed stem until the tobacco reluctantly fizzed into life and the heady smoke filled his nostrils. ‘Where you be, girl?’ he muttered, squinting into the mist. ‘’Taint a night to be out on the marsh.’

  A gnarled shape loomed suddenly in the gloom and he caught his breath, choking on the smoke from the pipe. It was only a stunted alder tree but it had given him quite a start, thoughts of demons and other unmentionables crowding his weary brain.

  The Levels abounded with legends of witches, goblins and marsh sprites and, even though the old man counted himself a level-headed practical soul – a pillar of his local church – on a night like this, it was easy to be seduced into believing anything.

  He remembered the gypsy crone who had called at his cottage only that afternoon, her eyes like gimlets and her lip curling with venom when he had refused to buy her clothes pegs. ‘A curse on ye,’ she’d snarled. ‘Bad luck will be yours for this.’ Peeping down at her from her bedroom window, Martha had mocked the old woman cruelly, calling her a withered old derelict, and she had responded with a stab of one claw-like finger. ‘Ol’ Strawfoot will come for ye, my beauty, that I promise. And then ye’ll be sorry.’

  Jeremiah shivered and gripped his pipe more tightly between his clenched teeth. Nonsense, he mused. Strawfoot was just a stupid story with which the old maids frightened errant children. ‘Be good, or Strawfoot will take you away,’ they warned gleefully, eliciting instant obedience. Well, Jeremiah Tinney was not a child. He was an honest God-fearing man and no foolish superstition about spectral scarecrows was going to get to him.

  He saw the derelict barn a few moments later and crossed the ploughed field towards it, his boots squelching in the furrows. Tom was already there and together they hauled the pair of heavy doors open and cast their lanterns around the interior.

  They saw her immediately. She was lying on her back in a corner, naked from the waist down, her body inert and strangely contorted, and the bulging sightless eyes and distorted lips, peeled back in a silent choking scream, testifying to the horrific ordeal she had been subjected to. And, as if this wasn’t enough, as a final cruel ignominy, a small straw doll had been forced into her mouth over her protruding tongue, like a grotesque infant pacifier.

  For a moment Jeremiah simply stood there, frozen to the spot by the horrific discovery, his pipe dropping from his mouth to the floor, the tobacco cascading from the bowl as the burning embers hissed to extinction in the damp mud. Then, very slowly, barely aware of Tom’s muttered prayer as he crossed himself or the tramp of feet as the rest of the small search party entered the barn behind them, he bent down beside the twisted corpse of his beloved daughter to take one limp hand in his own. ‘What in God’s name—’ he blurted with a choking cry.

  ‘God?’ another rough voice cut in harshly. ‘God had nothing to do with this, Jeremiah. It be the devil’s work.’ And as the light of the speaker’s lantern fell on the bare floor in front of the dead girl’s feet, the old man noticed for the first time the trail of straw leading across the barn to disappear into the mist billowing in through the open door. ‘’Tis the work of ol’ Strawfoot hisself.’

  And as he spoke, the heavy doors behind them stirred uneasily under a sudden inexplicable blast of cold air and something scrabbled along the outside of the barn with talon-like fingers.

  CHAPTER 1

  Exactly 150 years after the murder of Martha Tinney, the mist once again billowed across the Somerset Levels, quickly devouring the sodden marshland and the lattice-work of rivers and rhynes that fed this vast wetland habitat and extinguishing the winking lights of
the cottages and wayside hostelries as effectively as a massive power cut. The white clouds rolled all the way out to the M5 motorway to the magical hump of Brent Knoll, completely blotting out the villages that crouched in its path. It imposed a sepulchral stillness over everything, a stillness that was broken only by the plaintive bleating of sheep and the sound of the cows in the waterlogged fields tugging at the long grass – and, very occasionally, as fuzzy headlights emerged from the gloom, the rumble of a slow-running engine when a car or lorry nosed onwards.

  Melanie Schofield’s high-heeled boots tapping out their steady rhythm on the patched tarmac sounded strangely loud and intrusive as she headed home but the quick sharp steps also communicated the fury that continued to grip the young brunette even after half an hour of rapid walking.

  The left side of her face was still sore from the slap her boyfriend, Ed Shearing, had given her – in response to the one she had dealt him – and, despite her anger at the way he had treated her, she had difficulty holding back the tears. To find him upstairs in bed with that blonde tart was bad enough but then to be thrown out of his friend’s house with the party still in full swing and left to face the long solitary walk home at past eleven at night was just unbelievable.

  It was creepy on the lonely road too. The annual scarecrow festival was underway in the village and the grotesque straw figures, dressed by the locals in their outlandish costumes, had given her quite a start when they’d first loomed up in the mist – some sitting astride garden walls, others standing like grim sentinels from another world on verges and in driveway entrances. More than once she’d thought she had seen one move, maybe wave a tattered arm or nod a turnip head in sombre greeting – half expecting to see the thing ease itself off its perch or tug its supporting pole out of the grass to stumble after her with jerky robot-like steps.

  She shivered, pausing a moment to wipe away her tears on the sleeve of her coat and cursing Ed through gritted teeth for abandoning her in such a scary place. She promised herself that she would tell her big brother, Dan, what the arsehole had done to her the first chance she got and her mouth twisted into a vindictive sneer as she savoured the anticipated outcome. Shearing would not be so full of himself after Dan had paid him a visit, that was for sure, and his new bimbo girlfriend would soon lose her hots for ‘lover-boy’ once she had seen the extent to which his face had been rearranged.

  Then abruptly Melanie’s sneer froze on her smudged lipstick and she jerked around to peer back into the mist, shaken out of her reverie by what she thought was the sound of footsteps a short distance behind her. But she saw nothing save swirling white vapour, forming, parting, then re-forming in serpentine twists and twirls, like a multitude of smoky questing tongues.

  Frowning, she moved on, her shivering becoming more acute as the damp crept up her thighs from the road surface through her tight jeans and her throat started to burn in the raw stagnant air drifting in off the marsh.

  The old stone houses watched her from behind their gates, silent and brooding, as she passed by – a couple still leaching ghostly light through gaps in the curtains drawn across the windows of their upstairs bedrooms – and the tap of her heels was thrown backwards and forwards between their high walls in dull flat echoes.

  But then she had turned off the main drag into a narrow lane and the vague outline of the marsh was opening up ahead of her. Shortly afterwards, there was nothing but fences and skeletal hedgerows, with the branches of stunted trees reaching over them towards her like curled fingers. A car passed her, heading out of the village, slowing briefly at the last minute as it caught her shadow in its headlights before it was gone and she was alone again.

  Moisture dripped on to her face from an overhanging branch and it was only when she stopped a second to wipe one eye clear that she heard the footfalls again and this time, when she turned a little more quickly, she thought she caught a glimpse of something among the swirling clouds of vapour – a dark shape, tall and thin but appearing disembodied, like a phantom, in the gloom. Then it was gone as abruptly as it had appeared, swallowed up by the mist as if it had never existed in the first place. Probably hadn’t either, she thought ruefully; just the Levels playing tricks on her.

  She heard nothing else after that save the tap of her high heels, but finally turning into the long driveway leading up to the old farmhouse she had called home for the past eighteen years, she imagined something flitted across the driveway in front of her – again indistinct and disembodied but resembling an upright male figure, dressed in a long tattered-looking coat and floppy hat – like one of the scarecrows she had passed on the main drag. Bloody hell, girl, she mused, what is the matter with you? Seeing straw men following you? Too much red wine at the party tonight, that’s for sure. You’re home now, so get a grip.

  Her house keys were in her hand before she reached the front door and she grimaced when she saw that there were no cars in the gravel parking area. Damn, her parents were obviously still out and her brother had told her he wasn’t likely to be back from his gig in Taunton until after midnight anyway. Just her luck.

  Then she saw the glow in the murk to her right and frowned. The barn: someone had left the lights on in the barn. Her mood brightened. The motorbike – Dan was obviously back earlier than he had expected and was working on the thing again, as he often did until the early hours, bloody idiot!

  Turning on her heel, she headed towards the light, relieved that big brother was on hand and keen to unload her night of misery on him at the earliest opportunity. Yeah, Dan would sort Ed out after what he had done, no question; Dan would give him a right hiding.

  The barn doors stood wide open and the distinctive workshop smell of the place hit her even before she stepped inside – a combination of oil, petrol and paint-spray that always made her wrinkle her nose in disgust when it greeted her. ‘Dan?’ she called. ‘You’ll never guess—’

  But she never finished the sentence. Dan’s old Triumph Bonneville motorcycle was there all right, partially stripped and standing in a pool of oil a few yards from her father’s Massey Ferguson tractor and rusted baler but there was no sign of Dan.

  Feeling more than a little apprehensive but suspecting that her brother had heard her coming and was hiding behind the farm machinery, preparing to jump out on her when she got closer – as he had on numerous occasions before – she stopped short beside the motorcycle and stared around the barn.

  ‘Dan!’ she called again, now more than a little frightened. ‘This isn’t funny. Where are you?’

  Something – possibly a rat – scampered away among the bales of straw stacked on the other side of the barn and she heard the soft whinnying of the two horses in the stable next door, followed by the nervous stamping of hoofs.

  ‘Dan!’ she snapped, suddenly angry again. ‘You’re pissing me off. I’m going indoors.’

  She heard the rustling sound almost at the same moment and, turning quickly, was startled to see a tall dark figure framed in the open doorway behind her – a figure that stood there as motionless as a statue, studying her with a silent unwavering intensity. In the long ragged coat and floppy hat, from under which stalks of straw protruded, it looked a lot like Worzel Gummidge but this wasn’t Worzel Gummidge – and it wasn’t her brother, Dan, either.

  CHAPTER 2

  Detective Sergeant Kate Lewis stomped into the CID office at Highbridge police station at nine in the morning, her freckled face pale and drawn through lack of sleep, ageing her beyond her thirty years, and her shoulder-length auburn hair needing an energetic brushing.

  ‘Kate?’ the office manager acknowledged from his desk in the corner, his gaze flicking briefly towards her, then back to the bar chart on his computer screen. ‘Good honeymoon, was it?’

  She threw him a hard glance and made straight for the coffee machine, thinking sourly of her wedding just two weeks before and the catastrophe that had wrecked her Seychelles honeymoon, resulting in the repatriation of new hubby, Hayden, straight to Taunto
n hospital with a back injury.

  ‘Don’t start, Dick,’ she snapped. ‘I’m not in the mood!’

  A former detective sergeant like Kate before his retirement five years before, Dick Stacey was not so easily put off. ‘So how’s the casualty then?’ he persisted, still studying his computer screen but now wearing a broad grin. ‘Damage any important muscles, did he?’

  Kate turned to face him, sipping her coffee, her blue eyes narrowed and wary. ‘Hayden hurt his back, that’s all,’ she said coldly. ‘Fell down some steps at the hotel, OK? They think he’s cracked his pelvis and are keeping him in for a day or so to run some tests.’

  Stacey chuckled. ‘As long as he hasn’t cracked anything else. Jumping off those foreign wardrobes can be pretty lethal.’

  Kate grimaced but ignored the remark. ‘Where is everybody?’ she queried instead.

  Stacey pushed himself away from the desk and swung round in his swivel chair to face her. His smile had gone now and his expression was serious. ‘Missing eighteen-year-old,’ he said. ‘Didn’t return home after a night out with her boyfriend.’

  Kate frowned. ‘Old enough at eighteen, isn’t she? We don’t usually get involved with adult mispers so early. She’s probably over the side with someone.’

  He nodded. ‘You’re all heart, Kate,’ he said. ‘Uniform aren’t happy, though. Local community support officer knows the family well and says it’s completely out of character.’ He hesitated. ‘Also, her dad used to be on the local Bench.’

  Kate treated him to a cynical smile. ‘Ah, now that explains it all. Nepotism still rules OK, does it?’

  He shrugged and turned back to his screen. ‘Maybe but DC Ashton has gone over there to take a look – DI Roscoe’s orders.’

  ‘And where is Mr Roscoe?’ she queried. ‘I thought he’d still be in bed.’

  ‘No, he’s not, Sergeant,’ a deep voice growled almost at her elbow. ‘He’s right behind you.’